The Multi-Step Sales Strategy

The key to leveraging your time is the use of a multi-step sales strategy.

When a car gets built, instead of handing all the responsibility and parts to ONE person and telling them “ok build me a car!”… an assembly line is used, where a GROUP of people each do their part to build the car. The car flows down the assembly line and at each step (or station) the car gets closer to completion – and eventually you have a fully built car ready to drive away.

There are a few reasons assembly lines are used:

Efficiency – because multi-tasking is inefficient, and people are far more productive when asked to concentrate on repeating one particular task compared with chopping and changing all the time.

Expertise – the more you complete a specific task, the better you’ll get at it and the faster you’ll get too. Expertise of course leads to efficiency.

Evenness – the fact that at any time an assembly line has products at ALL stages of the production process, means stability and consistency in completing products.

Now let’s consider an assembly line, or multi-step sales strategy, in the mortgage broking industry.

If you generate a lead and head straight out to see them for 2 hours, get to know them, have to sell them on your services, collect all their information and data, run some live scenarios and calculations, fill in the loan application, have two cups of coffee, pat the dog… you get the idea… ALL AT THE SAME TIME during the first appointment – you are trying to build a car yourself! This is how most brokers work.

The alternative is breaking this process up into multiple stages, just like an assembly line.

The first step after generating the lead might be to call the lead and run a 5-min pre-qualifying exercise with them – after all you don’t want to waste your time if they don’t qualify, and you don’t want to waste their time either.

Next, if they qualify, you might send them a questionnaire to complete (i.e. needs analysis) and arrange a phone appointment with them to collect information and get to know them and their goals.

Now armed with all this information (from your phone appointment), you can go away and run your scenarios and calculations, to create a solution to your prospects needs.

The final step might be a face-to-face meeting where you present your solution to them, answer their questions and get a commitment from them.

Of course the process goes on to application, approval, settlement… and can include additional steps along the way too (such as cross-selling other services as part of your solution).

Using a multi-step model in broking is powerful because:

It’s more efficient. Instead of spending 3+ hours with a prospect to sign up a deal (using the one-step approach), you can leverage and outsource parts of your assembly line and end up spending less than 1 hour with a client to sign up a deal. When I was broking I got this down to about 30-mins and my clients loved the process.

You harness expertise. Remember the saying “a jack of all trades, a master of nothing”.

Your sales funnel will always be full – from new prospects just entering the pre-qualification step… right through to deals getting signed up and settled. A multi-step sales process will enable you to take on, look after and process MANY more leads and clients than a one-step approach.

ADVANCED:

The advanced tip is simple. Using the multi-step sales model, you eventually want to outsource ALL aspects of the funnel and instead focus purely on filling it with new prospects through marketing your business.

In one week, the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme comes into force. The scheme mandates that Australian Government agencies and businesses with obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 (Privacy Act) must notify you if you are likely to be at risk of serious harm because of a data breach.

From 22 February 2018, the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme (NDB scheme) will require a wide range of organisations to report data breaches that are ‘likely to result in serious harm’ to the individuals whose personal information is affected by the breach. They will also be required to notify the OAIC.

The Australian Information Commissioner has released a direction regarding certain procedures to be followed during an Information Commissioner review (IC review) which takes effect from 26 February 2018.

Individuals who were in immigration detention on 31 January 2014, and were affected by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s February 2014 data breach, now have an opportunity to provide information about any loss or damage suffered as a result of the breach.

Private sector health service providers will be required to notify affected individuals and the Australian Information Commissioner of data breaches that are likely to cause serious harm under the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme.